SchoolMessenger is a school community software featuring secure email, social media monitoring, school website, and mobile app. In late 2023 it was acquired by PowerSchool, and is now a PowerSchool product.
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Higher Logic Vanilla
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.
SchoolMessenger used to be a good product for home to school communication. However, if it can't properly integrate with big name, run of the mill student information systems, they really have no business being recommended or used by school districts. Allowing data to be released to parents about other students and parents is what every school district needs to protect against. Would not recommend them for any communication that needs to integrate with any other systems. There are plenty of other competitors out there who provide more responsive customer service and support.
Vanilla Forums is well suited for growing communities that wish to expand without having to change software. Existing larger communities may find the user management part of the tool lacking, although this could be from my lack of experience.
They provide excellent customer service to us on a weekly basis. If we have questions or find something that we'd like improved or even something new we'd like to add to our program, we have a dedicated person we can reach out to who helps us facilitate that change.
We're fond of their add-ons. We use many of them in our community. Some keep our members engaged on a day to day basis. We really like reactions, the keyword blocker, the civil tongue filter, and a few customized add-ons that Vanilla added specifically for our community.
They send us notifications for all upcoming releases, and update their software frequently.
Cost is significant. Not unreasonable, to lower price would be great.
Support is very, very slow to respond. Unless you call in it takes several days to receive a response. I've had tickets open for over a week to resolve the issue.
Creating visual themes can be difficult. Although there is an open source version of the software, some of the plugins (gamification, badges) are not available for download, so any visual theme that includes them will need to be at least partially developed on their servers, vs doing the whole thing offline and then uploading it all at once. This can be time consuming as each code change has to be checking in to Github and then imported into their server cluster.
SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.
Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.
The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.
We went from Final Site to SchoolMessenger. Final Site had a lot of customization with so much functionality and a real professional look and feel. Unfortunately, the cost set us on a new path, which led us to SchoolMessenger. SchoolMessenger packages a lot of the services we need in one, but it is missing core elements of design that Final Site offered us.
Most of all we could customize the forum to look and feel like an extension of our existing web properties. This makes the forum feel more native to the users coming from or being redirected to the forum. We also had plans of being able to create custom badges we could grant users which was a limitation to many of the platforms we look at at the time. Since we are a software and cloud company, working with a product we could customize and automate via the API was another big factor. Today we have automated flows for reviewing and accepting improvement requests and then pulling them into our ticketing system and updating the deployment status of those requests one we push our updates to our users. Most importantly, Vanilla came forward with a reasonable cost to match our existing CSS and make a template that was easy for us to maintain as we grew.
SchoolMessenger is an excellent tool that links the school admin with the parents directly, which avoids the risks of students not delivering the message.
Saves money and time not being held hostage by the US postal service.
